USA TODAY Review

'After the Fire': Friendship forged in a harrowing ordeal

Robin Gaby Fisher's moving account of two college roommates' struggle to survive and then cope after they're horribly burned in the 2000 Seton Hall University dorm fire is not one of those books you can't put down.

In fact, you almost certainly will put this book down after every chapter or two, if only briefly, to sigh over the unimaginable pain and suffering, to dry your eyes and steady your emotions. You'll have to break from the book to douse the gruesome scenes of the deadly fire from your mind and erase disturbing details from inside the hospital burn unit.

Then you'll read on, hoping against odds for a triumphant ending.

The story starts eight years ago with a 4:30 a.m. fire raging through the freshman dorm. Awakened by a fire alarm, Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos crawl out of their second-floor room into a hallway filled with choking black smoke and a blast of heat so intense it sears their skin. They barely get out alive. The arson-set blaze leaves three students dead and 58 injured. But beyond the fire's terrifying drama, most of this book intimately documents Simons and Llanos' long and painful fight to recover and reclaim normal lives.

Fisher, a feature writer for The Star-Ledger in Newark, covered the story for nearly eight years. She wrote a seven-part series about Simons and Llanos that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and led to this book. Her newspaper-feature style translates well into a fast-paced narrative, and her meticulous research digs deeply into the night of the fire, the law enforcement investigation and modern medical treatment of burns.

She populates the story with a cast of secondary characters whose lives were affected by the fire from Llanos' well-meaning but smothering parents and his stressed-out girlfriend to Simons' strong single-parent mother and the heroic doctors, nurses and therapists at Saint Barnabas Hospital's burn unit.

But mostly Fisher focuses on Simons and Llanos, her longtime subjects, and the remarkable friendship that aided their recoveries. Indeed, if this uplifting story of courage and friendship raises any doubt for the reader, it's that Fisher seems too close to her subject at times her portrayal of Simons and Llanos is almost too good to be true.